I know this question has probably come up a lot, but why is it that CD-R/Ws always have 80 minutes, or 700 MB written on them, when 1 MB is roughly one minute. If that were so, then it obviously would have 80 minutes, or 80 MB on it. I was just curious as to why "it is what it is".

1 minute of an .mp3 file is equivalent to close to 1 mb. An .mp3 file is a compressed version of a normal sound file (e.g. a .wav file), which is, usually, of higher quality than a .mp3 file. Music on a CD is under the form of a nomal sound file, which is not compressed and, hence, takes up more space.

If you rip a song from a CD to a wav file, or convert an mp3 file to .wav, you will see than 1 minute of music equals to about 10mb. When you encode a .wav file into a .mp3 file, a lot of the data contained in the .wav file is trown away, resulting in a music file of lesser audio quality but which is vastly more efficient in terms of hard-disk space.

Actually, .WAV is a Binary file that represents the sounds information. The more binary a piece takes up (namely the larger the filesize for the same duration) gives supposed better quality.

.MP3 however isn't just "Compression", it's Vector Mechanics. It is working out the sounds shape and then creating enough information to "Synthesis" it from less data. It can give you something that sounds near enough the same, although lacks the overall quality of the binary.